Even
on Oscar night, the war in Vietnam still rages. With a billion people glued
to their tubes, the old battle cry that "the whole world is watching" was
once again true.

As "Fog of War" won Sunday
night for best documentary, we have an AWOL president prancing in a flight
suit he did not earn, and a Democratic front-runner who was a hero on both
sides an issue that still deeply divides us.

Most recently we've also
had "The Quiet American," a stunning portrayal of how the US actually got
into that horrible war. Behind them both loom the ghosts of three men: John
F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and the centerpiece of "Fog of War, Robert
McNamara.

Kennedy is still with us
because we don't know what he would have done. Bitter disputes still rage
over the meaning of his withdrawal of 1000 (of 16,000) advisors just before
his death, and his pledge to be out of Vietnam in 1965. Angry lawsuits have
flared up---and could again---over whether Lyndon Johnson was misled, who
might have done it, and why he escalated that catastrophic war in an
unparalleled act of individual, party and national suicide.

But the real roots of this
conflict come from the Cold War. "The Quiet American" is as brilliant a book
about the era's folly as has ever been written. Graham Greene's graceful,
understated portrait of the prototypical young CIA operative who blunders
around 1952 Saigon like a buffalo in heat is a multi-layered classic that
will last through the ages. The Oscar-honored film adaptation does it
justice. Michael Caine is brilliant as the weathered Brit making his last
journalistic stand in the distant provinces. He has gone native and has
burned his bridges behind him. Brendan Fraser brings him the war he needs to
justify the outpost. As a cocky, Harvard-style imperial missionary, Fraser
shows us how imperial America decided it could and would tell the Vietnamese
and the rest of the Third World how they would be governed. With his Boy
Scout handbook on installing non-communist regimes, he sounds like an early
neo-con explaining how things will be in Iraq. Though stockier and smarter,
he conjures the frat boy George W. Bush running loose in the imperial
tropics. Now in video/DVD, "The Quiet American" has its slow moments early
on. But it's a stunning, essential portrayal of how we got into the quagmire
that ruined this nation.

Robert McNamara's
performance in "Fog of War" is equally essential, and follows on nicely.
Clearly this is the octogenarian's mea culpa and farewell performance.
Sharp, aggressive, brilliant, he did not sit for 20 hours of interview
without purpose.

Ironically, the greatest
shocks come with his discussion of his role in World War II. Instrumental in
the fire bombing of Tokyo at the end of World War II, he almost casually
admits to being a war criminal. He adds, with a line for the ages, the
deciding factor in what constitutes a war crime is which side won the war.

But since that was the
"Good War," McNamara knows he can be forgiven. In Vietnam, we lost, and
things are more delicate.

This film from Errol Morris
is very slickly produced. The music from Philip Glass is hypnotic, and the
quick-step use of graphics is imaginative.

But the packaging---and
lack of balancing counter-narrative---produces some shocking moments. For
example, McNamara tells us that when told Vietnamese Premier Diem had been
murdered, JFK turned ashen. The implication is that the killing came as a
surprise.

But Kennedy himself ordered
Diem's murder. It came on November 1, 1963, just three weeks prior to JFK's
own murder. For McNamara to say merely that Kennedy lost his coloring is a
jaw-dropper. It could, indeed, have been true. Perhaps Kennedy realized at
that Shakespearean moment that he had committed America to an impossible
burden. But the implication he didn't know the killing was coming is absurd.

In retrospect Kennedy's own
close-on death seems almost divine retribution for that ill-conceived
murder. While one may disbelieve that JFK would have done otherwise, it is
clear from then on that Lyndon Johnson prosecuted the war with the belief
that it had to be won. The portrayal of Vietnam as Lyndon Johnson's war is
widely shared.

McNamara is widely quoted
as telling LBJ the war couldn't be won, and is happy to repeat the sentiment
here. But key is that he never said it SHOULDN'T be won. And toward film's
end he offers yet another shocking dissemblance. At a "reunion" dinner
between former American and Vietnamese adversaries, McNamara says he almost
"came to blows" with a counterpart who told him the Vietnamese were fighting
for their independence, and not as part of the international communist
conspiracy.

Here the scenario is almost
laughable. Most of the world not hypnotized by American television knew
quite well that the Vietnamese had been fighting for their independence for
a thousand years. They fought the Chinese, the Japanese, the French, the
Americans. And after the Americans, they fought the Chinese yet again.

For us to swallow what
McNamara says happened at that dinner we would have to believe he knew
absolutely nothing about Vietnamese history. He apparenlty means to imply
that somehow this horrible war was a just frightful, tragically avoidable
misunderstanding.

Oh, please!

In the postscripts we're
reminded that McNamara went on to serve many years at the head of the World
Bank. He was every bit the imperialist there, with a legendary disregard for
home rule and ecological sanity. We come away believing that he may have
made the right call in telling Kennedy and Johnson we couldn't win in
Vietnam. But he never answers for why we were really there. Only a more
complete discussion of his goals and "achievements" at the World Bank could
give us that insight, and for that we'll have to await the outtakes. Maybe
Errol Morris can put them on the DVD.

Meantime, by far the most
frightening sequences of this film come in McNamara's pre-Vietnam
discussions of the Cuban missile crisis. There's little that's new. But
whatever one thinks of this man morally, there's no disputing his technical
genius, or that of our young president at the time, and his brother. They
faced all-out nuclear war and somehow didn't let it happen.

Fast forward to the crew
currently in the White House and you have a genuinely terrifying reality.
Vietnam was a horror show. And McNamara was a smart man whose value system
did not include the heart or wisdom needed to pull us out of what those
"Quiet Americans" got us into.

But he, like the makers of
"The Fog of War," have the good sense to warn that we are now at the brink
of a "rabbit hole" in southwest Asia not unlike the one that decimated us in
southeast Asia.

And tragically, that
earlier jungle quagmire didn't hold a candle to what the fundamentalist
fanatics now running this country could do to the world in a complex
confrontation involving real weapons of mass destruction. They need to go,
soon. They need to be replaced with people that have McNamara's brains, but
with a human value system to match. Or we could all be goners.

If there's a subtext
message to these two films, and to all Americans in this election year, it's
that we need a crew in Washington with both brains and heart. Right now, at
our great peril, neither is to be seen.